At this time, about 70% of people who answered the poll on that page said they're lonely. Of course there is an obvious selection bias, but even so I find that number troubling. Loneliness is different from being alone, or single, or being a loner - it's a painful feeling of social isolation.
I wonder if those articles encouraging people to "just get over themselves" and be social are conveying the wrong message entirely. For some people that advice might be outright harmful. The more you're being told your salvation is other people, the more your pain and isolation grow. The media introduces yet another yardstick for you to fall short of.
At the extreme ends of the spectrum there are socialite extroverts, and eremites with no social desires, respectively. But most people fall in between. Being in a group (or a relationship for that matter) is not the universal cure for Weltschmerz. For most people, there is a balance between being social and being a lone individual, meaning you need both in a ratio that is appropriate to you.
The key is to be comfortable with it - I was fighting the same oh-my-god-im-socially-poor thing but then I realized I don't happen to enjoy being in company of people not very close to me. I've since embraced it - I no longer view that as some kind of deficit I need to compensate for. And you know what that has made me better socially. It might sound weird but when you drop the whole expectation burden, when you no longer try to fit in, you become yourself and other people naturally like that.
I've been accused of having poor social skills, but I think that's a rude enough thing to accuse someone of that it just screams hypocrisy.
I've been told my quietness makes people uncomfortable, but telling people that they are being quiet is... supposed to achieve what? That's not a way to start a conversation, it just puts people into a defensive mode. How graceful!
I've been told I don't smile enough. I would be a poor comedian indeed if I went on stage demanding that people laugh simply because they paid for the seats like it's an obligation.
I have perfectly fine social skills. I just know what my priorities are, and I'm not willing to pretend you are one just because you'd like me to. I don't value that inconsistency.
I wouldn't say you had bad basketball skills just because you have better things to do than play the game with me.
There are people who are a priority to me, and they seem to like my social skills just fine. And if someone wants that out of me, they aren't going to get there by telling me I have poor social skills or that I don't smile enough. That's burning your bridges, and not an example of someone in a position to offer criticism.
If you stop playing basketball halfway through a game, and your rationale is "I do what I want, not what you guys want" you have _both_ poor basketball skills _and_ bad social skills.
I've been told my quietness makes people uncomfortable
I've been accused of being rude just for politely asking to reduce the volume (imagine playing music at full volume in a car, windows closed) - most people don't have any sense of how much noise pollution they are causing. Being quiet is just not possible for them or even making less noise. In my experience it takes so much effort to make them understand that avoiding such situations is a better option.
It's easier just to not hang out with people you don't like. Then you can avoid getting accused of having poor social skills because they won't even know you.
If there are specific people on your job that you don't like, you do have to be professional & cordial when working with them, but you don't have to socialize with them besides that.
If you don't like anybody at your job, it's time to find a new job.
> have barely learned to "fake it" well enough to pass as a normie
So do I. I don't mind to practice social skills but I can smell the b.s in many people and don't like the fake socialization, so I prefer to be alone (now with my dog) with a small number of real friends who have the similar concept.
I've learned to "fake it" so well that I can seem more social than my wife, who is a very social person. And yet, I'm always aware (on some level) that I'm faking it. Life is funny ;)
It's not easy to talk about. People tend to get defensive.
Most smiles that I see seem forced, for example. And even when I'm eavesdropping. So it's not just about me ;)
But it can be learned. Decades later, I still vividly recall the video sessions at the start and end of the est 6-Day course. Most people managed to own their act.
Sadly it gets worse you factor in if you're a member of the LGBT community like me. It's why I had to get a therapist and move to a bigger town. Just so I can get out of my shell and stop being scared to talk to anyone. :S
There is nothing that compares to church in the southeast when it comes to social events and getting to know new people. So many varieties of people at all stages of life. If they didn't spend so much time preaching down on people outside of religion I would be at church at least a couple times a week.
The amount of "preaching down" varies a lot by denomination. Pretty common in Southern Baptist churches. Pretty uncommon in Episcopal churches. Catholic churches pretty much depend on the temperament of the pastor.
I see the problem as the fact that people actually feel the need to be social in the first place. If you're fine inside your own head and with your own thoughts, there's less of a pull to need to be social. If I don't like something or I'm not doing well, I want people to know. I want people to be human (in the way I feel I am).
That's a bit self-referential. People not at ease socially are also often not very clear about themselves. How many have a phase (years or decades) where you keep running around and then you finally click and stop caring that much about society's opinions.
An actor said he had deep personality disorders, had to go through therapy for 20 years. He's still as weird, but he doesn't give a f. now. I went through this very slowly too. I knew someone who had the same kind of small epiphany.
Sure, but at the same time, not caring about having to be social is also not giving a f. Works both ways. It could also be said that it's not something to be fixed, but rather a reason to seek out like-minded people.
As an overall example (unconnected with seeking out like-minded people), I'm social when I feel like being social (40% of the time) and not when I don't. For those in a similar situation, to be made to feel bad about themselves and their choices, I don't think that's necessarily helpful.
The idea of "just get over themselves" can definitely be harmful and that one can "be social" by switching something on/off is definitely not something that someone can "just do".
The conclusion is entirely not based on results from this study, if it can be called a proper study.
What can be told from the abstract, is that sample size is extremely small (19 individuals), there don't seem to be any control parameters and the distinction of "lonely" and "not lonely" is made based on self reporting, which is yet another source of potential errors.
Other than that, the subject studied was reaction speed, which can be interpreted as basic alertness, and even if we consider the results reliable, which we can't, the conclusion could be made almost entirely different - lonely people are more alert to their surroundings, while non-lonely are more calm and relaxed.
I'm not sure who are reviewing these studies, but it would never pass as a conclusive study by any standards in non-social sciences.
> is that sample size is extremely small (19 individuals)
This is not meaningful. I'm not sure why this keeps getting repeated, but it's entirely possible to get significant results from small sample sizes. No comment on the rest of the study, but I just don't think sample sizes are worth mentioning, and I wouldn't even call that "extremely small". This is what significance testing is for, after all.
With regards to self-reporting, I read a very nice defence on this in a book on the scientific study of consciousness [1], which basically says that we need to let go of this idea that self-reporting is somehow "unscientific", because some phenomena only exist as experiences (and I'd think loneliness is one of them), and therefore the scientific study of these experiences has to incorporate self-reporting on some level. You can't get a blood test for loneliness.
I don't think self-reporting is unscientific, but I do think it's not particularly reliable. Reported loneliness may correlate with actual loneliness, but they're different phenomena.
This was really driven home to me in doing product development and user testing. I've worked with some great user researchers, and they were extremely skeptical about self-reported characteristics. The classic example is, "Would you buy X?" People are terrible at answering that correctly and honestly. But there were a bunch more where we carefully rigged situations so we could measure behavior rather than self-reported internal state, because behavior ended up being a better measure of internal state for us. I could well believe the same is true for loneliness.
I'd also disagree that some phenomena only exist as experiences. As far as we know, all experiences are also physical states in the brain. We currently may not have the tools to usefully read that physical state. We may not have a blood test for loneliness, but we may one day have a brain scan for it. Or, perhaps sooner, a pattern in the sort of data that will be gathered by the iPhone 15m (the "m" being for medical, of course).
> I'd also disagree that some phenomena only exist as experiences. As far as we know, all experiences are also physical states in the brain.
Absolutely. But in order to map those experiences to those 'physical states' you have to trust self-reporting. I agree with you that questions such as "Would you buy X?" are incredibly unreliable when it comes to self-reporting, so I understand the skepticism, but I don't think loneliness falls into that category, because it's not something that can be externally tested (we can't observe the person to see if they're "truly" lonely or not).
Hmm. I'm not following your logic. It sounds like you're saying that reported loneliness isn't unreliable because we can't externally test it. I'd think it's just the opposite; if we have no external tests, that's a great reason to assume it's unreliable.
That said, I'm not as confident as you that it's not externally testable. These researchers, for example, believe they have found EEG test results that correlate with loneliness. It would seem to me that loneliness could change both self-generated behavior and response to stimuli, which could yield reliable measures. Sociality is a biologically mediated phenomenon, so there could be metabolic measures, like how cortisol is an indicator of stress. We expect loneliness to happen in the brain, so aside from EEG measures, perhaps we could find an FMRI test that exposes it.
> It sounds like you're saying that reported loneliness isn't unreliable because we can't externally test it. I'd think it's just the opposite; if we have no external tests, that's a great reason to assume it's unreliable.
I'm not disagreeing with you on that--there's always the possibility someone's lying to you, and that has to be designed into your study as best as possible. It's difficult. My point is more that we don't have any other choice if we want to do a scientific study of things like loneliness. Or anything else that only exists within the context of one's own head for that matter.
> That said, I'm not as confident as you that it's not externally testable.
Perhaps it is. I'm only wary of these things because it's very easy to find correlations. Studies of depression are full of this. You can find a certain brain region or gene or hormone level or whatever correlated with depression, but then you find someone who also feels depressed who doesn't exhibit those symptoms. So do you tell that person they're not "really" feeling depressed? Of course not. And fMRI studies are open to abuse too; I'm sure you've heard of the "dead salmon" study, but if not: http://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
I'm actually optimistic, as you are, that there will be better diagnostic tests for a whole range of mental conditions/experiences/illnesses/etc., but the core criticism still holds: if you want to trust a diagnostic test of a mental state, ultimately, at some point, you will also have needed to trust the self-reporting of that mental state.
I think we broadly agree, but I can't go as far as agreeing with this: "If you want to trust a diagnostic test of a mental state, ultimately, at some point, you will also have needed to trust the self-reporting of that mental state."
I think it's true we can generally trust people's self reports. But we all know that's not always true. There's the classic comedy staple:
A: You sound upset.
B: I AM NOT UPSET!
But there's more subtlety there, too. Anybody who deals with children has had the experience of understanding what the child is feeling better than said child does. And I remember being on the other side of that as a kid. People would ask me how I was doing, and I would self-report whatever answer I thought they wanted, not my actual state, which was often mysterious to me.
And although that has lessened as I grow older, I still can look back on key moments as an adult where I thought I was feeling one thing but, upon later reflection, realize it was something else.
So I think the best we can do is to come up with a series of external tests that correlate well with self-reporting and with each other. With that, yes, I think we can tell people, "No, you're not really depressed." For example, in the months after I lost my mom to a brain tumor, I thought that I was depressed. I went to see a therapist and she said, "No, you're mourning an important loss. It's supposed to be like this." And she was right.
This! We find focus groups nearly useless; folks are so eager to please. You get nothing but "Yes this is great. Maybe change the color to yellow". But you learn nothing about what would really appeal or sell.
I'm thinking focus groups should change to some sort of psychological test situation. "You can take only one of these home for free. Which one do you want?" I.e. perceived scarcity (cost) would elicit honest responses.
Yeah, I have never found focus groups of any value. I don't understand how one separates social effects from actual effects. And many user researchers agree. E.g.:
User focus groups may not be useful, but user testing can be. I'm thinking of studies where you give users some tasks to do, and watch how they interact with the UI to accomplish that.
As part of an ongoing study I have been conducting my whole life, I have found self-reported cleverness, self-reported attractiveness, and self-reported indications that "the guy over there wants fight me" to all be positively correlated with alcohol intake.
Can you elaborate on why small sample sizes are not a cause for concern?
It's my understanding that when designing a study, you look to strengthen statistical power, which is determined by a combination of a) significance criterion (p values, confidence intervals) b) magnitude of the effect and c) sample size. Increasing the sample size decreases sampling error.
Just from a common-sense perspective, if the sample of the study was n=2, then any results derived from significance testing would be nonsensical - how can we extrapolate our findings to a broader population? Is n=19 good enough?
> It's my understanding that when designing a study, you look to strengthen statistical power, which is determined by a combination of a) significance criterion (p values, confidence intervals) b) magnitude of the effect and c) sample size. Increasing the sample size decreases sampling error.
I don't disagree with this at all. You always want to increase your sample size if possible. But as you also say, the magnitude of the effect you're observing is also important; if it's very strong, then it can be revealed by a small sample size. An absurd example could be "cyanide capsules kill (n=2)". Obviously, the smaller the sample size, the harder it is to draw reliable conclusions, but I wouldn't think n=19 is necessarily too small. I think many of phase I clinical trials aren't much more than that.
More importantly, mentioning a "small" sample size makes a nice soundbite, and is often used to discredit studies. These studies might be good or they might not be, but talking about sample size can be used as a "thought-terminating cliche". Perhaps a person is looking for evidence that reinforces their own beliefs (we all do it), and they read a criticism of a study, it mentions "small sample sizes", and they can walk away happy in a belief the study was flawed. But all that's really happened is that it's prevented a proper discussion of the study taking place. I'm not sure how much of a problem this is, but I've seen it happen frequently.
Got it, thanks for the explanation. I generally trust that the authors of such studies know what they're doing when they design an experiment with a certain n value in mind. Agreed that the insufficient n argument does crop up a lot around HN.
Also important, I recall a note from one of my statistics classes to the effect of, strong sample sizes are often counter-intuitively small.
I want to say the example was something like polling in a political race, and the math worked out that you could get reliable results polling only a few tens of people so long as you had random sampling.
One of my professors had a rule of thumb of discounting anything below n=25, but you absolutely need to ensure random sampling as its one of the fundamental assumptions of regression - making sure the probability of being part of the sample is uniform across the entire population.
> ... but it's entirely possible to get significant results from small sample sizes.
It is also possible to simply guess some effect. You don't need study for stating a result. A purpose of study is to prove something. A study that can not be told to be proven and is not replicable is not worth anything, as further scientific knowledge cannot be built on top of it. If a study do not prove or at least strengthen confidence in a theory, what is it worth? Not even meta-analysis will consider studies like these to prove some entirely different theory because it is just that unreliable.
Now I'm not saying this particular study is entirely like that, but the flaws everyone mentioned are concerning.
My new anti-loneliness antidote? I adopted a puppy. Scout demands that we get out of the house—multiple times a day. She happily makes friends with everyone she meets. And if the people we meet like Scout, it is a pretty good bet I will like them.
I don't know the author's background but this surely is no way to reduce loneliness in itself. Loneliness is, as I see it, about not having a good friend or partner with whom build a meaningful friendship or relationship.
Loneliness is about quality and no amount of quantity doesn't make it go away.
Of course, you can't find quality unless you wade through enough quantity but meeting new people is consuming in itself. Thus, a natural balance will establish itself. You will spend some time finding friends, and probably a lot more time to just go by life yourself.
Also, unless you become your own best friend first it's really hard to build a friendship where you see each other not because you need each other but because you enjoy each others' company so as to choose spend time together. This is where I might suggest that you can't fix loneliness by finding friends per se.
I'm a deeply unsocial person who's often lonely, and unexpectedly got a dog a few years back. My 2c on this:
a. the physical exercise that a dog needs is also good for you and can help stave off the depression that can easily accompany loneliness.
b. social interaction is tiring for some people. How you got your dog, what your dog is like and so on is an easy, low-effort conversation to have, and it's also one that can be managed without causing offense - if you're tired or having a bad day, you can always cite a need to walk the dog home. This allows you to enjoy some friendly conversation without needing to locate it in any kind of semantic framework (eg 'is this person being friendly or just networking with me').
c. dogs are very generous emotionally and also very reliable. They will try to trick you into playing ball or possibly destroy on of your shoes and try to hide it, but basically you don't need to second-guess them the way you do people (including yourself). Your dog doesn't care what anyone else thinks of you and likes seeing you happy. It may be a simple friendship but it's a very sincere one.
d. over time, your dog is in many ways a reflection of you, a four-legged psychological mirror, if you like. If you choose, you can learn and adjust things about yourself through observing how your dog responds to you. If you need to make life changes, your dog doesn't need you to explain them.
So while a dog won't cure loneliness, they're excellent at helping you deal with it.
I suspect you're overthinking it a little. As my mother would have said, "At least it gets you out of the house".
A puppy doesn't solve every problem. It doesn't magically find best friends for you. But it nudges you to make the first step, and keeps you from being a complete shut-in and starting a downward spiral of isolation.
>Accept social invitations, even if you don’t feel like going out.
>It isn’t enough to rely on random invites. Get your calendar out and map out your social life. Make sure your week is scattered with social activities.
This is the worst advice possible. I did this when I was a freshman at uni. Just saying yes to every invitation. Disco, birthday party, cinema, whatever. I thought it'd reduce the loneliness. But I never ever enjoyed it, and I felt lonelier than ever before. Then, at some point, I got a tinnitus from a disco visit. It's not loud, luckily, and I can barely make it out throughout the day, but it's there. But that was when everything changed. I started saying no to everything. Now, I maintain very few relationships but they're much deeper. And I'm happier like that. Don't ever say yes to things that don't feel right.
College may be a bad example, social interactions are pretty available generally speaking. I think this advice is more targeted at people who are going long stretches with big, psychologically dangerous holes in their social "nutritional diet." This can happen much more easily later on.
That doesn't mean go to night clubs when you hate them, but it does mean that if you rely on chance, you could go without for a long time. You could join a book club, a political party, volunteer in a kennel, do street art, join a architectural restoration organization, boxing club, sex club or anything that you do like. The thing is that you need to plan something that will include the types of social interactions that you need for psychological health, if they are not serendipitously available in your lifestyle at a point in time.
As a counterpoint to your experiences, accepting invitations despite not feeling like going out works very well for me - at times when I'm feeling loneliness (or its onset) I almost always find that forcing myself to accept an invitation gives positive results.
Perhaps as suggested by another commentator here, the concept of loneliness is nuanced - e.g. you were looking for deep connections whereas usually I just want some fun companionship, or something like that.
I've got friends that I like spending time with but for the most part I like being alone.
Sometimes (a lot of the time actually) I just don't feel like going out or socialising in any way.. There is some solitary activity I am looking forward to, like coding or learning some new programming skill (I'm learning Rust at the moment), learning guitar, reading a book I've just bought etc.
Hell, maybe I just want to relax and play a game like Cities: Skylines.
At those times I'll just tell people straight. I won't be out tonight, I've got stuff to do/I don't feel like it.
It doesn't need to be treated with any more significance than that.
Not to mention that people who scatter their calendar with social activities, in my experience, often get stressed and have an actual more stressed weekend/vacation than the stress at work (if any).
The message, at least, is sound. You need to be proactive about making friends and being social, not just sit around and wait for life to happen to you.
Tangential comment, but regarding your tinnitus, there was this on reddit the other day that reportedly helped some people, you may want to take a look:
"Loneliness and implicit attention to social threat: A high-performance electrical neuroimaging study; Cacioppo S, Bangee M, Balogh S, Cardenas-Iniguez C, Qualter P, Cacioppo JT."
Note that the researches explicitly don't evaluate the reactions as being "more negative." They measured the speed of the threat detection in ms: 100 ms vs 250 ms.
"Abstract: Prior research has suggested that loneliness is associated with an implicit hypervigilance to social threats-an assumption in line with the evolutionary model of loneliness that indicates feeling socially isolated (or on the social perimeter) leads to increased attention and surveillance of the social world and an unwitting focus on self-preservation. Little is known, however, about the temporal dynamics for social threat (vs. nonsocial threat) in the lonely brains. We used high-density electrical neuroimaging and a behavioral task including social and nonsocial threat (and neutral) pictures to investigate the brain dynamics of implicit processing for social threat vs. nonsocial threat stimuli in lonely participants (N = 10), compared to nonlonely individuals (N = 9). The present study provides evidence that social threat images are differentiated from nonsocial threat stimuli more quickly in the lonely (~116 ms after stimulus onset) than nonlonely (~252 ms after stimulus onset) brains. That speed of threat processing in lonely individuals is in accord with the evolutionary model of loneliness. Brain source estimates expanded these results by suggesting that lonely (but not nonlonely) individuals showed early recruitment of brain areas involved in attention and self-representation."
>"seven were nonsocial and positive (pleasant scenery) and seven were nonsocial and negative (snakes)"
This seems kinda flawed as far as designing the experiment to present threat and non-threat stimulii. If you're an agoraphobic serpentophile then you're not seeing things the same, surely. People are going to be on a spectrum of finding scenery panoramas to be hugely positive to finding them hugely negative??
What strikes me is that "Dr. Cacioppo" (whichever of the couple that is) doesn't seem to have a clue what loneliness is like, nor having no friends. All the suggestions assume you have time and money to spend too; perhaps that's right for a WSJ audience. "Accept social invitations, even if you don’t feel like going out." seems quite clueless, are their people who're lonely but are getting social invitations and have friends they can call and make plans with?
The abstract suggests a moderately interesting preliminary finding, assuming the ten lonely people didn't also respond faster to the other stimulii. A wider study to confirm the result and then a new experiment to establish causation seem like the next moves (if they can be funded). You'd probably need a longitudinal study to see if speed of response to "social threats" changes as people become, or perceive themselves to be, more/less lonely.
> assuming the ten lonely people didn't also respond faster to the other stimuli
Yes, that's important to control in a properly performed experiment. I don't have the access to the whole paper, maybe somebody who does will write here with more details.
> doesn't seem to have a clue what loneliness is like, nor having no friends. All the suggestions assume you have time and money to spend too; perhaps that's right for a WSJ audience. "Accept social invitations, even if you don’t feel like going out." seems quite clueless
It seems you are the one who reads that as "time and money." I read this only as, if somebody calls you to come out and play, don't say "thanks I'll rather play with myself." (heh) And typically we have more opportunities to do something than we accept or even recognize as such. Yes, it's hard to do anything but the work if our work week is 80 work hours, but it's also something that we have to care about and not use as an excuse for doing nothing but the work and as the only purpose of our lives. The article also mentions "get your calendar out and map out your social life."
> "Dr. Cacioppo" (whichever of the couple that is)
It's in the article: "John Cacioppo, professor of psychology, psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience and director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago."
I literally have no money to have a social life, I could get more money but that would require less time. Around work, caring for family and other duties there's no time left and no energy left to make the huge effort of finding someone to kickback with.
But yes, making a conscious effort not to shrink back at an opportunity is good - the general feel however is that they're addressing people who socialise, who have a cadre of friends but who feel lonely. Perhaps this group exists(?) but it seems it would be a thin sliver compared to the group who feel lonely because they haven't friends and don't have a social life at all.
Per the last point "two new studies by the husband and wife research team John and Stephanie Cacioppo, psychologists at the University of Chicago". Perhaps she's a professor or other title but when referencing in subsequent paras I think it's necessary to specify Dr John Cacioppo (or whatever)?
People are going to be on a spectrum of finding scenery panoramas to be hugely positive to finding them hugely negative??
People are going to be distributed along pretty much any spectrum that you can imagine. The value of statistical concepts like distributions is not in providing certitude but providing a way to quantify and manage your uncertainty. This is why it's not a big deal that people lie on surveys - lies cancel each other out or stick out like a sore thumb depending on whether they're perverse or systematic.
Incidentally I like snakes a lot but that doesn't mean I consider them trustworthy :-)
No doubt they were relying on previous research showing that these things would be positive|negative stimulii to a high degree of certainty for all participants.
A proposition I have come up with: Loneliness is wanting or needing some particular kind of interaction with other people, and not getting it. (Consequently there are different kinds of loneliness for each different desired interaction.)
... I would try to compare this with the content of the article, but I find it difficult to interpret. First, the title appears at odds with the studies: "respond more negatively to social stimuli", without qualifiers, implies "to [all] social stimuli"; while the studies apparently showed "electrical activity ... was more extreme than that of non-lonely people when shown negative social cues", rather different from all.
Second, its presentation of the studies seems to be cut off: it describes the precise setup of each study, the numbers of people in each group and of positive/negative, social/nonsocial words, and then goes into general commentary. The only description of the results that we have is three paragraphs earlier, where it says the abovementioned about "lonely => negative-social is even worse" but doesn't mention the other outcomes. I don't see a link to either study. In theory I could assume that the fact that she didn't mention the other outcomes was because lonely people were equivalent to non-lonely people in the other scenarios, but the inappropriate title and the way that it's presented as a non-technical article for non-technical people don't give me faith in such an assumption. So unfortunately I don't have much to go on.
(Actually, it sort of looks like someone took a technical article summarizing the studies, and a "discussion and advice aimed at a general audience", and interleaved several paragraphs from the former into the latter. Well, anyway.)
If anything I find people putting on a face more offline. Online, you can be yourself with far less consequences thanks to anonymity. Yes, this leads to some showing they are horrible people, but it lets others show vulnerable sides they are too scared to show face to face.
This is a biased modern American perspective: if you're lonely or have no friends, you're probably depressed because you 'failed' in life.
For me, and many others, loneliness is a blessing that has helped me do things most ignore: exercising, reading about Philosophy, developing ventures,etc. Plus, I'm never 'bounded' to my social circle and have resided in 11 countries.
By the way, I look like an innate salesman. Always smiling, making jokes, building a network, etc. Still, I'd rather be on my own.
I found out that my first language apparently doesn't make a distinction of it. I tried to find synonyms, but none was able to grasp such difference. That's fascinating.
So your first language doesn't distinguish between "being alone" and "loneliness"? What is the word, if I may ask? Or at least, what is the emotional tone? Is it neutral, or negative?
'In lingua inglese il concetto viene espresso con due differenti vocaboli, solitude e loneliness, che si riferiscono rispettivamente al piacere e al dolore provati in condizioni di esclusione'
'In English, the concept is expressed by two words, solitude and loneliness, which refer to pleasure and pain in the condition of exclusion.
Thanks. I'm struck by the Wikipedia entry on the song "La solitudine" by Laura Pausini: "The lyrics to the Italian version of the song where are about a boy named Marco, who is separated from his girlfriend at the urging of his family and sent to live far away from her. The now former girlfriend makes an emotional and heartfelt plea, singing to him about the loneliness and pain they would feel without each other."[0] So that's clearly about feeling lonely, aka loneliness.
But the article goes on to say: "The English-language version of the song, adapted by Tim Rice, has a completely different meaning, and it doesn't contain any reference to Marco. Its lyrics are focused on the feelings of those who want to be alone in order to better understand themselves."
But what I get is that the Italian word "solitudine" is ambiguous, meaning both, in tension, with awareness at multiple levels. In English, one is forced to choose: solitude (chosen, positive) vs loneliness (imposed, negative). English probably takes after German in that, I'm guessing.
In English you would say you are solitary, so you enjoy solitude (the condition of being alone). I do too! But when you are in a non-solitary environment (like a city) and you have difficulty in forming a social relationship despite an abundant supply of people, then you may feel lonely.
I would agree with you, but [parent] touched on the media, and general American public perception that people simply cannot be content in being alone. Not only that, but they also conflate introversion with preferring solitude (not always true), or even worse, social ineptitude (even rarer).
I've also noticed that some of my friends who did just like being alone ran into most of their grief trying to reconcile this, as opposed to grieving being alone.
> "It is important to be self-aware about what loneliness does to your brain — that it primes it to be hypervigilant to threats and go into self-preservation mode. Feeling lonely might mean you need to reinterpret your view of your social interactions, says Dr. Cacioppo. For example, if you feel a friend has slighted you, ask yourself if you were actually hostile and in an isolation mode first and your friend is reacting to your behavior. “You need to understand that you may be responsible,” says Dr. Cacioppo."
Interesting. This suggestion sounds very similar to advice given to those diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (a condition that's thus far resisted all attempts at being renamed "emotional dysregulation disorder"). Recent research seems to indicate that the defining features of BPD are: 1) the presence of emotions that are disproportionately negative and intense for the situations that caused them and 2) an inability to subdue those negative emotions and alleviate anxiety.
In other words, if a family member routinely says "I love you" at the end of every phone call but forgets to say it one time, then there's a decent chance that someone with BPD would start wondering if their relative hates them for some reason.
Society assuredly isn't your friend. The assumption behind its behaviour seems to be: 'So-and-so is unsocial and therefore unfriendly, and so, in the name of friendliness, we must denigrate/exclude this person.'
Society doesn't exist in this context and therefore it can have no assumptions. You are dealing with individuals. Individuals with limited time, energy and maybe even limited social abilities.
If someone reads as aloof and disinterested, how are you as an individual going to disambiguate between them being scared of social situations vs them being truly disinterested? Always remember that the other side of the social interaction is another person with their own inner life - they aren't just the particular face of "society" that is presenting itself to you.
Of course society exists in the in the context of a discussion of loneliness and social life, why wouldn't it? Also, people's social behaviour is controlled by memes of which they are unaware, so their inner lives can be disregarded for social purposes.
The one part of the article that makes sense is the definition of loneliness; that it happens where there's a gap between one's social relationships and one's desired social relationships.
My point was to try and reduce that gap not by increasing social skill and exposure but by being honest about the value of social life. Actually I think highly social people and lonely people both share the somewhat conflicting assumptions that society is cruel and that social life is the be-all and end-all. In the former case the response is to 'get with the winners', in the latter to withdraw. Both will ultimately end up frustrated if they fail to develop the inner life you mention.
My point was that you don't deal with society directly, you deal with individual people. Ignoring their personal motivations and grouping everybody who isn't you into "society" doesn't sound like a productive way to interact with individuals.
Because of this, discussing society and whether it is or isn't your friend in this context makes as much sense to me as discussing whether the Grand Tetons are your friend.
Essentially, when I hear "it's them versus you and they don't like you much" (my reading of your first post) I hear a lot of alienation and I don't think it's a useful framework for helping lonely people make sense of the world.
Thanks for taking the time to explain what you meant.
You are right about the fact that ultimately we deal with individuals, but we are also quite good at assessing how invested individuals are in social norms and (to a lesser extent) predicting how that degree of investment is likely to bias your relations with them.
There's definitely a personality aspect to how folks perceive lonely vs not lonely that's completely independent of how many people are actually around you. I'm the opposite of you- I can see good friends and go out every day of the week, but the moment I'm not currently engaged: lonely
I wonder if those articles encouraging people to "just get over themselves" and be social are conveying the wrong message entirely. For some people that advice might be outright harmful. The more you're being told your salvation is other people, the more your pain and isolation grow. The media introduces yet another yardstick for you to fall short of.
At the extreme ends of the spectrum there are socialite extroverts, and eremites with no social desires, respectively. But most people fall in between. Being in a group (or a relationship for that matter) is not the universal cure for Weltschmerz. For most people, there is a balance between being social and being a lone individual, meaning you need both in a ratio that is appropriate to you.